Urban Fantasy: How Many in the Conspiracy

[Username17]

Fraternities have admitted a little over 2% of the population of the US, but about three quarters of congressmen, senators, and corporate executives were members of a fraternity. Walmart employs one person out of every hundred in the United States. One American in every 275 is a Jehova's Witness. State and Local Police Agencies employ about one person in every three hundred. Active duty personnel in the Navy is more than one per thousand (though only one in one hundred and twenty thousand Americans are currently Navy Seals). Active duty National Guardsmen represent one per two thousand. The various right-wing militia groups constitute about one hundred thousand people, which is collectively about one member for every three thousand. The US Intelligence Community is a federation of 17 separate government agencies, and the NSA is the coolest of them and it constitutes about one person for every ten thousand people. There are a similar number of people in the FBI, but if you restrict it to just the "special agents" that's one person for every twenty thousand in the US. In the United States, fully one in nine people is a millionaire (a distinction that has grown pretty dubious considering the inflated price of real estate in many regions), while less than one person in five hundred thousand is a billionaire.

So to set up your Urban Fantasy supernatural secret society, there's actually quite a lot of range where you could compare it to very different sizes of organizations. If the wizards are equivalent to elite soldiers or techbro super-rich they might be numbered in the hundreds to tens of thousands for the US - which is a few orders of magnitude in range.

Another issue is location distribution. Many Urban Fantasy books place most of the supernatural people into just a few areas, which substantially reduces their national and global footprint. This is essentially the CIA solution. Most of the CIA lives in and around Langley, Virginia, so if you personally live far from the Maryland-Virginia corridor you are unlikely to meet an active CIA agent and they probably won't have a difficult time pretending to be something else if you do. This is actually very difficult for a Role Playing Game, because it leads naturally to questions like "Why don't I just leave?" which profoundly limits the kinds of conflict that you can have. A more likely setup for an RPG is to have small groups of supernaturals posted all over the country - like the FBI. And like the FBI, this means that the number of special agents available in many areas is quite small. Nevertheless, the FBI is obviously small enough that they could pass undetected if they weren't regularly advertising their existence and promoting themselves.

Another issue to consider is turnover. Undergraduate fraternities get whole new memberships every four years or so. People normally retire from the Navy Seals after 20 years. But people don't retire from being Vampires like ever. This means that the rate of recruitment into supernatural conspiracies is going to be slower than for similarly sized mortal organizations in our world. But it also means that supernatural creatures don't have to worry about having their secrecy blown up by retired members.

What this all boils down to is that supernatural societies of the sorts bandied about by Harry Potter and Vampire: the Masquerade are demographically possible, either confined to localities or spread throughout the US and the world. And indeed there is room for Masquerade style supernaturals where they have a lot of mortal servants.

To put that in perspective: if there is 1 member of the Camarilla for every ten thousand humans, then the Camarilla has roughy as many members as one of the alphabet soup intelligence agencies you've never heard of. If the average number of Renfields per member is between 6 and 7, the number of vampire thralls is roughly equal to the number of Unitarian/Universalist church members. These are workable numbers.

-Username17

[Longes]

It's probably worth looking at the IRL 'wizards' as well. Ordo Templi Orientis has about 2k people worldwide. The population of each individual city O.T.O. is present in is far too small to support internal politics beyond anime club level, but O.T.O. as a whole is big enough to have spats over cult's direction and secret sub-societies of Crowleys who practice left-hand path and just want to bang women. The issue for the RPGs is that those evil super secret societies are probably the entirety of O.T.O. in a city, even if they are a small part of O.T.O. as a whole.

This would fit the Tremere-style "we have nine billion secret societies inside our clan". Every chantry is preaching its own heretical doctrine and is a secret society inside the Tremere as a whole, but they are all too small to have in-chantry divisions between loyalist Tremere and heretic Tremere. Each chantry is either fully loyalist or fully heretic.

[Username17]

Regardless of how your supernatural conspiracy is divided geographically, you're going to want to have the subdivisions of your supernatural society be unequally distributed geographically. It's just numbers. You want to have the player characters interact with sandboxes that have approximately one hundred supernaturals in them at a time, whether those sand boxes are geographically large or small, whether the setting posits these sandboxes as numerous or few. And that's small enough that if you divide the local sandbox between all the subfactions you want in the entire setting then each group is absurdly tiny everywhere.

Consider the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It's a small analytics and intelligence arm attached to the State Department. It's got a bit over 300 people who spend all day compiling reports for the United States' diplomatic staff. And it's divided up into operating units that specialize in compiling different kinds of information and making different kinds of reports. The Africa group has 13 people, the Europe group has 17 people and so on. This means that if you map these groups to various relevant subgroups like the Blackulas and the Carthians or whatever, you have two ways of scaling them to the size of the sandboxes players are putzing around in: either each group is like 1/3 of the size, or the groups are the presented size but only one third of them happen to show up in any particular domain. If you cut all those groups to proportionate size, then the domain you're in has like 4 Blackulas in it - which might not even be enough for the player characters and certainly isn't enough for the player characters to also have NPCs from their own faction to interact with as mentors, quest givers, rivals, or fucking anything at all.

So pretty much what we're left with is the idea the Sabbat or the Jade Wheel Society or whatever is simply not present to a meaningful degree in every domain. If your game is set in New Orleans you'd select some number of groups that had a relevant presence, and they'd all have a relevant presence. And there would be other groups that would have a presence in Dallas or San Francisco or whatever but wouldn't have a significant presence in New Orleans.

Naturally the next question is how many such subgroups you can fit in the world. And the answer is... kind of a lot actually. Once you're no longer worrying about trying to make the Brujah a force in every domain people are playing in, the creation of more groups just means that the Brujah have a presence in less domains, rather than the Brujah's share of the population getting turned into a smaller and smaller pie slice. Big countries like the United States and Russia can have hundreds of domains in them, so you could write in as many groups as you have conceptual space for and still have all of them have meaningful presences in all the domains they have menaingful presences in (tautology is tautological).

Conceptual space is way more limited in a lot of ways than White Wolf tried to go with. I don't think you'll ever have space for there being a secret faction inside the secret faction of the secret faction of the Sabbat or any of that shit. But you could potentially have quite a few different flavors of vampires and witches if you carved things up right.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

If you slice it up so that not every subgroup is meaningfully present in every location, what's the strategy to avoid the trap option situation you identified here? Or is the idea something like this geographical heterogeneity of distribution only really applies to NPC factions, and since there's a much smaller group of options presented as core player character paths you only have to make sure those have shit to do no matter where things take place?

[Username17]

If you slice it up so that not every subgroup is meaningfully present in every location, what's the strategy to avoid the trap option situation you identified here? Or is the idea something like this geographical heterogeneity of distribution only really applies to NPC factions, and since there's a much smaller group of options presented as core player character paths you only have to make sure those have shit to do no matter where things take place?

The broader question of "what happens if you're the only Sasquatch in Kuala Lumpur?" is something your setting is going to have to answer regardless. The players are going to go to other domains sometimes, the White Wolf idea that characters would simply never leave New Orleans for the entire campaign was... unlikely. And when they go to other domains, their entire coterie are going to be outsiders of a sort whether their syndicate, clan, or subreddit has any presence in the new city or not.

So while it's possible to have the occasional area designated as unwelcoming to foreigners (for example "Belfast is hard mode, because the local monsters are deeply involved in a long running conflict and mistrust all outsiders"), the general assumption has to be that foreign monsters have a place in the politics of most domains. This is very much the opposite of the assumptions that White Wolf made, but for simple playability a Sabbat vampire or a wereshark from the Laughter Factory or whatever who comes into a Camarilla city has to be able to participate in local politics and not simply have someone blow a shofar and start a blood hunt as soon as they show up.

Once that inversion is made, the need for individual domains to specifically have a Camarilla presence goes away. Now it's still a good idea for there to be a small number of familiar syndicates who collectively have a major presence in virtually all domains - but that's so that players can wrap their minds around what local political structures are supposed to look like. If the local power structures are a bunch of Steves, the players are going to be pretty lost pretty much all the time because no amount of reading about the setting will allow them to tell you whether a Bishop is higher ranked than a Baron or what.

I'm not sure what the absolute cap on how many "major syndicates" your setting can support, but I suspect it would be somewhere between 3 and 7 due to listing issues. Minor groups have virtually no limit, and it's OK to keep writing them in as you expand the setting.

-Username17

[Mord]

Having a set of Traditions that all of your global and local conspiracies adhere to helps tremendously. When you get down to it, all you need are a handful of rules to make sure different domains are at least minimally capable of diplomatic exchange:

1) The Masquerade - everyone stays under it, period.

2) Presentation & Hospitality - you can't murder foreigners when they visit, as long as they present themselves promptly to the local authority, unless they give just cause and you provide fair warning.

As long as you as players can rely on these things, anything else can be up in the air - whether the domain is ruled by a Prince or a Directorate or an elected President, how feeding grounds are assigned, limitations on creating more Kin, whether meetings of all the Kin in the domain are frequent or rare, if those meetings are mandatory or optional.

This actually makes for a wider range of storytelling opportunities. You can have the Domain of Istanbul be appropriately Byzantine in its complicated nightly social expectations, while the court in the Domain of Yukon-Nunavut consists of First Citizen Jerry, who astrally projects to check in with each of the Kin living in the vast wasteland about once a year.

On the other hand you do want some notion of a "generic" power structure, which is why you write up one or more sample domains ruled by the most common conspiracy(ies) in your core rulebook. There's not really so much gained in terms of players immediately knowing what everyone's title is from one domain to the next, against losing all the little social differences you could throw at them for flavor and social combat if all domains don't work in exactly the same ways.

I think the meaning of "Camarilla city" from OWoD has to be kind of abandoned and reworked - a "Camarilla city", or a "Cauchemar city" or a "Jade Wheel city" is not one where literally all the Kin are members of that conspiracy. Rather, it is a city where the ruling faction aligns with that specific conspiracy, and while this might enforce certain norms on the populace, mostly it doesn't change much of day-to-day life. The Camarilla Prince of Atlanta may be deposed and replaced by the opposition leader who endorses the Sabbat because they provided resources to back his coup, but that doesn't mean the local population scatters and flees to the nearest Camarilla domains or that suddenly multiple roving packs of Sabbat biker gangs descend on the city to wreak mayhem. It just means that for the next few decades things are run by the new guy, who ocassionally does a favor for the powerful people outside the domain who set him up in his new gig.

More than a "Camarilla city" or a "Sabbat city", Atlanta is just "a city" where Kin live and get along as they do. The need to enforce the Masquerade means that even the most hostile of takeovers are unlikely to break out into full-scale war, and even if the old Primogen Council gets firebombed in an especially nasty changing of the guard, there's no reason to think that the populace at large won't just go along with the new Jade Wheel bosses.

Some conspiracies may have stronger central organizations than others. Maybe the Camarilla is extremely decentralized, and local Princes hardly ever get together and all influence is informal and reliant on personal social positioning. Maybe the World Crime League does actually have an Admiralty that cares a lot about what it is that their local Captains get up to and regularly issues orders. Or the central Inconnu secretly rule the world by supporting Princes and such who claim to be loyal to other conspiracies.

In practical effect, the different conspiracies probably have to act more like political parties exchanging control over the provinces within a nation than different nations exchanging control over provinces.

[Grek]

So what you're saying is, Camarilla and Sabbat as political parties?

[Username17]

I think the model is more "gangs" or "feudalism." So the local mob boss has some sort of wider conspiracy that he talks to, or the local Count has some Duke that he has nominal allegiance to - but the rest of the guys are just guys. If the local boss is replaced and is no longer a member of the Zetas and is instead a member of the Yakuza, they'll be dealing with different people out of town, but the criminal element won't change very much in town.

It's an important idea, because it means that on a local level you aren't a Camarilla Vampire, you're a Vampire and the local authorities are Camarilla. Which means that the rules change depending on where you go, but the local authorities don't normally have standing orders to kill any Vampires who come from Shelbyville.

It also means that player characters can come in and participate in local politics for whatever locality the game takes place in without having to have made a character who was specifically a member of the Jade Wheel Society already.

-Username17

[elotar]

"About 900,000 gang members lived "within local communities across the country," and about 147,000 were in U.S. prisons or jails in 2009" - this is the demographics you should look at when thinking about Vampire numbers.

99% of Vampire stories are not about elite infiltration specialists fighting elite information gatherers, so intelligence agencies has nothing to do with it.

To make functional WoD you should not insert "Supernatural" into real world and try to fix problems, you should switch some existing roles in the real world for supernaturals. And then all falls into place.

So, for example, Bruja not control the mob, brujah are the mob, with elders as godfathers, ancillae as officers ets down to ghouls and mortal pawns at the street level.

Or this - "Fraternities have admitted a little over 2% of the population of the US, but about three quarters of congressmen, senators, and corporate executives were members of a fraternity."

Ventrue not control corporations, corporations are made to sustain ventrue, elders are majority shareholders, ancilla key executives, and whole system of business education and carrier building is a process to filter potential new recruits.

ets for all others you can think of.

You can put as many vampires as you like into any location.

Think big, there are no limits.

[Mord]

So what you're saying is, Camarilla and Sabbat as political parties?

Not exactly - there's not a Vampire Congress or whatever the fuck where every few Novembers you pull the lever for the Sabbat or Camarilla candidate for the Sheriff of Detroit. The analogy is more about the coexistence of these broad-based groups within local areas, where both sides want to exercise control, but both groups are constrained in their actions by a shared set of norms and thus do not generally shoot at each other or drive each other out en masse every time there's a leadership change.

Republicans don't take power in Minnesota by invading from Montana and driving every Democrat in the state across the river into Illinois, nor do they purge the entire state government/bureaucracy of officials who served under the previous Democratic regime. There will be some high-level musical chairs as major officeholders are replaced by members of the new regime, but the Assistant Deputy Comptroller for Public Works is still probably going to be the same guy who's been in that job since 1987. Likewise, everyone in Minneapolis still goes to work on Monday.

Likewise, though violent transitions of power do take place in "civilized" domains, it's generally neither practical nor desirable for a conspiracy to seize power by doing any more murder than necessary. When the Jade Wheel takes over the Domain of Minneapolis, the new Grand Administrator is probably a guy who was already living in the domain, possibly a member of the local Primogen Council, who has either always had ties to the Jade Wheel or enlisted their support with the goal of taking out the sitting Prince. This support was probably in the form of intelligence resources or spreading the word among local Jade Wheel associates in the domain that "this here is our guy, you should support him" - probably not in the form of assassins or stormtroopers.

In such a coup, the sitting Camarilla Prince is at least as likely to be exiled as he is to be murdered, and the elders of the Primogen Council who backed the coup are likely to keep their jobs but change their hats to become Mandarins of the August Assemblage. Lesser functionaries who were not known to be especially close supporters or new appointees of the former Prince, such as the Sheriff's Hounds and the Harpies, might just keep their jobs as if nothing happened.

The Domain as a whole is mostly unaffected; it's just that now the central Celestial Court of the Jade Wheel Society expects the local Grand Administrator to run things in accordance with Jade Wheel principles - maybe they will send an Inspector to supervise the regime change - and for the new Grand Administrator to supply them annually with thirteen kilograms of pure silver or one rhinoceros penis. For Joe Witch on the street, the only difference is that maybe he bumps into a few new Thai immigrants to the Domain, and now he's required to attend a grand ritual on the lunar New Year instead of getting snubbed from the Prince's New Year's Ball every year.

[Thaluikhain]

If I squint my brain a little, that doesn't seem too unlike the Cold War, with MAD in the form of breaking the masquerade.

[Mord]

If I squint my brain a little, that doesn't seem too unlike the Cold War, with MAD in the form of breaking the masquerade.

You could also think of it that way, sure. There are definitely hawks in the Sabbat's College of Cardinals who really do want to wipe the Camarilla off the face of the Earth, and they're generally contained by the moderate faction that won't accept the risk to the Masquerade involved with any such policy.

So you do end up with situations where the Domain of Atlanta, ruled by a Camarilla Prince, gets infiltrated by Communist Sabbat agents, some of the Primogen get flipped, and the Prince has to declare a state of emergency and start purging people to forestall a coup.

And also, much more rarely, you get a Korean War or Vietnam War or Afghan War scenario, where Sabbat and Camarilla proxy factions in the Domain of Seoul or Saigon or Kabul get into a shooting war and the Sabbat proxy calls in stormtroopers from the Black Hand and the Camarilla proxy gets a Justicar involved. But at no point do you actually have a declared Sabbat-Camarilla war in the general case, even if some Black Hand goons actually do end up in a gunfight with Archons in a Pittsburgh rail yard.

What I dislike about the Cold War analogy, at least as far as the mental associations I make with the concept, is that it implies a great deal of central control on the parts of the superpowers. That is to say, if it's a Cold War scenario, you might be playing in Zaire, but that implies the existence of Wisconsin and Belarus, i.e. places where the central state apparatus of one of the great powers does exercise direct control unfettered by concerns about the other side's foreign policy and where adherents of the other side really are arrest-on-sight. Since the idea here is not to have unipolar domains, even within the broader context of a bipolar or multipolar world, I think the Cold War analogy doesn't do it for me.

Additionally, in the IRL Cold War, the two sides presented fundamentally different ideologies that prescribed incompatible ways of organizing the economy and society. This is also a problem with the "political parties" analogy, because it's not really clear to me what it is the Camarilla, Sabbat, World Crime League, Jade Wheel Society, and Pentex are arguing about on a level other than who gets the biggest cut of the drug trade in any given jurisdiction.

I have no trouble believing that the people in the top echelons of any of these organizations are very passionately concerned with who gets the money, but I can't really figure out why Joe Vampire or Jane Witch would want to take sides on any grounds except to get a cut for themselves. To that extent, the most appropriate metaphor might be the Mexican drug war, which is a petty and awful conflict that doesn't exactly stir anyone's imagination.

Such a scenario would be totally fine and appropriate if you were looking to create a scenario where PCs interact with the conspiracies on the same level as Shadowrunners interacting with the corps, but that seems to be a pretty drastic and meaningful departure in theme and tone from our implicit OWoD starting point.

[Chamomile]

To my estimation, there are three main playstyles for a WoD game.

In Game of Fangs, a Mexican Drug Cartel setup is perfectly usable, because fighting for who gets a bigger cut of the coke money is the whole point. Maybe you have some moral code you want to impose, but the basic framework you're dealing with is a bunch of vampires who are pure power-mongers trying to get ahead by any means necessary who may or may not have any ideological loyalty at all and in any case who fights for who certainly has far more to do with ancient alliances and blood feuds than with ideological differences. There might be a House Stark that is more or less the good guys, but they'll probably have some total assholes fighting under their banner just because House Stark are the feudal lords of House Torture Porn.

In Vampions, you interact with all the different organizations principally as different flavors of bad guys. There is probably one organization that is more or less Team Good Guys, although even then, the Watcher's Council and season 5 Wolfram & Hart wound up the bad guys in the end. Granted, that says more about Joss Whedon's storytelling preferences than the needs of the genre (I'm pretty sure the BPRD never turned evil), but that still leaves a maximum of one organization that needs to be "the good guys" and everyone else can go ahead and just be rank power-mongers fighting over who gets the biggest slice of the meth pie.

And if you're doing the thing where you listen to Evanescence unironically while brooding about how we were always monsters deep down or whatever, then it is again not especially necessary that different organizations have meaningfully different policies, because the local prince is probably only there to facilitate a descent into monstrosity or something.

Having different organizations have meaningfully different policies that make life in the city noticeably different based on who's in charge is neat, but it's not actually required. No one turns up to Vampire hoping to play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

[MisterDee]

I mean, if someone forced me to play a game of Vampire: the Masquerade I'd spend the entire evening wishing I was in front of the computer playing SMAC but I don't think that was what you meant.

[Username17]

Without Conflict, there is no story. But conflict doesn't have to mean combat. And in a sandbox with only 100 local supernatural NPCs, it often should not.

The basic issue is how many of the stories should be basic X-Files stuff where you investigate and then fight a supernatural villain, and how many of the stories should be basic Soap Opera stuff where you talk smack about people behind their backs and try to secure support for projects and such. And the answer is obviously going to vary from group to group but probably include a non-zero amount of both. You got Werewolves whose ability to turn into a giant monster isn't especially meaningful unless and until the combat music starts, but you also have lots of other magic powers that assist you in sneaking and seduction and all kinds of other non-lethal interactions.

The big issue of course is that for the most part it takes more NPCs to have a political conflict than it does to have a physical conflict. A story about hunting and fighting a slasher generally only needs one slasher, a "big twist" could be that there are two, and even if you want to have a big brawl scene you don't need additional supernatural creatures on the opposing side because the extra bodies can be Renfields and usually should be.

From a social structure standpoint, that means that in your 100 you need a lot of creatures that are "in" the local organization and not very many that are "out." Having a conflict where you are trying to vie for the position of Harpy in New Orleans requires a lot of participating members of the New Orleans supernatural social scene, but having a conflict where some Troglodyte has gone all leatherface on the outskirts of town really only requires one enemy Troglodyte plus or minus a degenerate family of mutant cannibal Renfields.

From a game design standpoint, that means that most demographic facts about a character should create potential conflicts within supernatural society rather than between supernatural societies.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

A random though, given that vampires overwhelmingly live in cities, wouldn't a better ratio than 1 vampire to 10,000 humans be 1 vampire to X,000 humans living in cities? Though, this would increase the potential population explosion of vampires recently, and be a bit fiddlier.

[Iduno]

A random though, given that vampires overwhelmingly live in cities, wouldn't a better ratio than 1 vampire to 10,000 humans be 1 vampire to X,000 humans living in cities? Though, this would increase the potential population explosion of vampires recently, and be a bit fiddlier.

Vampires only? Probably.

I think the current discussion assumes 1 supernatural entity per 10k, which would be filled by stuff like werewolves and hedge witches outside of cities.

[kzt]

Being the vampire who runs a rural county or large town could be a good racket. But not for a cooperative game.

[Username17]

The bottom line is that personal character generation choices cannot be allowed to invalidate group campaign setting choices and vice versa. That is to say, your choice to play a Vampire can't make it so that the group cannot choose to have the game be about being trouble shooters for the Cauchemar, and the group's choice to set the game in Seattle can't make it so you cannot choose to play a Penanggalan.

However many dials of character generation you want players to have, none of the choices can tell that one of the other players can't make choices of their own. But while most people would regard that as fairly uncontroversial, but equally as important to an Urban Fantasy RPG is the idea that you're going to also have to make collective decisions about the nature of the campaign: it's location, its themes, the driving goals of the group, and so on - and none of those decisions should be off the table because one of the players brought a character with basic character generation dials set one way or the other.

That puts some constraints on things. You can't offer basic character concepts that are unable to hide behind the Masquerade. You can't have basic character concepts that can't have political interactions in major playable locations. But also too you can't have major player factions that operate as "No Homers Clubs" for Werewolves or Witches or whatever.

So you got a set of basic campaign concepts:

• Trouble Shooters: The player characters work for a domain, solving mysteries, fighting monsters that don't get with the program, covering up supernatural goings-on, and rooting out rebellions.
• Homesteaders: The player characters are a pack of supernatural creatures that are moving to a domain that doesn't have a recognized authority and attempting to become it - taking over mundane resources and bringing whatever local monsters to heel.
• Profiteers: There is ongoing conflict between multiple factions in the domain, and the player characters do mercenary work for one or more of the factions.

All of those have to be open to every available player character monster type. And all of those have to be open to every available player character subtype no matter what syndicate is nominally in control of the domain. The player characters need to be able to claim Fresno for the Cauchemar or the Covenant, and they need to be able to do that whether one of the characters is a Frankenstein or not.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

So I'm visiting Columbus OH for the first time. Per Wikipedia it has a population of just under 900K and is the 14th most populous city in the United States. There's a lot of ways that you could have a populous vampire society in a town like this. There's a strange mix of 19th century buildings next to high-rises. I was particularly struck by the Columbus Club a mansion across the street from a 36 story building. The Columbus Club is an invitation only club - totally the place you could put a Ventrue gathering and it wouldn't even be weird.

There are also spaces for lease that you could have squatters, or, better yet, the company offering the lease could avoid taking any serious offers to offer a hangout for Brujah or Toreador.

There's no reason you'd have to limit yourself to 80 vampires, or even 800 vampires. I think you could fit 2k in the city or 5k in the surrounding metropolitan area and maintain your masquerade. As long as they're not killing people every night, at least.

[Username17]

The demographic limits of supernatural creatures is... complicated. Essentially, it has to not push suspension of disbelief to the breaking point in any of several ways.

In a city like Columbus or Austin or Kansas City or Cleveland that sits in a ~2 million person metropolitan area it's easy to imagine having 2000 vampires fit in there securely. They can occupy some gated communities and do some Stepford Wife shit and have some old meeting grounds and even do the occasional blood feast by snatching up vagrants or having victims shipped in from Syria or something. That's a local demographic of 1:1000, and you could totally imagine how it would work in some places. But it beggars belief that things would be like that in all places.

2000 vampires in Columbus you could imagine. 2000 vampires in Cleveland you could imagine. But 2000 vampires in Columbus, and 2000 vampires in Cleveland, and 2000 vampires in Cincinnati, and 700 vampires in Akron, and 134 vampires in Springfield, and so on and so on for nearly twelve thousand total vampires in Ohio is rather pushing things.

The 1:10,000 number I keep quoting isn't a random number plucked out of the air or my ass. You get severe problems if you shift the ratios an order of magnitude in either direction. White Wolf's own postulated 1:100,000 isn't enough for 45 vampires in fucking Detroit, so you can't really have vampire politics at all. Detroit is a pretty major city that is also a crumbling ruin and a monument to previous capitalist movements. Like, obviously you would want to be able to tell vampire politics stories in fucking Detroit, and 45 vampires isn't enough to do that. In a 1:1000 model you have four thousand three hundred vampires in Detroit which is more than you need because it's a large enough group that you couldn't even name them all if you were dedicated to doing that. To put that in perspective, there are 2,103 named characters in the Game of Thrones novels. Not only do you not need for there to be over four thousand vampires in Detroit, but it strains credibility for there tobe that many and also have there be a 326 vampire community in Kalamazoo.

1:100,000 and 1:1000 can pass the smell test for some places, but neither one passes the smell test when you think of the implications for low, medium, and high population areas in your setting. It's easy to imagine how a 2000+ vampire community could stay off the radar, but it's much harder to imagine how 36 of them could stay hidden simultaneously in the US. Much less how there could be over fifty separate vampire communities with more vampires than people at my high school.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I think it's clear that whatever 'overall distribution' you choose, it makes sense that you're not going to have a perfect distribution. One shouldn't be saying 'this city has a population of x, so it should have x divided by 10,000 vampires'. Instead, it should be something along the lines of 'you need 300 people minimum to support a vampire'. Then a city with a population of 3000 could have 10 vampires, but that'd be weird because they're really at maximum population density. It wouldn't be weird that there are NO vampires in a town that small - just because they could doesn't mean they would. If you accept that the distribution (or concentration) varies widely then you can have different stories based in part on how many vampires there are.

As far as having 4k in Detroit (more than you could name), I don't know that it is a problem. It definitely depends on the power level of individual vampires and of the players. If the players are 'unknown' or 'newly created' vampires, you don't want an exhaustive list of all of the vampires in a town - if you do that there is no room for the players to create a new vampire. Having a pool of 'undefined' characters that they can draw on when you introduce a new party member is a good thing. If I had 4k vampires, I'd probably limit myself to defining 20% of them (800) with the other 3200 being a reserve pull to detail when the story calls for it. Knowing the vampire that is starting a serial killer spree (threatening the masquerade) and getting the players involved was tied to the community and existed without causing problems for some period of time helps ground the adventure and provide suggestions for how players can identify who the 'monster' is.

If you're building your Vampire game, the smart thing is to define areas that have higher than 'normal' concentrations of vampires, and WHY. Old European capitals might all have high concentrations for easy to imagine reasons. Detroit or Columbus need a reason that they got that way in a relatively short period of time.

[Username17]

One shouldn't be saying 'this city has a population of x, so it should have x divided by 10,000 vampires'.

No. That's pretty much exactly what you should be saying. Because you're talking about a cooperative storytelling game, so if the player characters decide to run off to Marrakesh or Nagasaki for whatever reason, there won't necessarily be a setting bible agreement of what is there before that decision is made. You could have a long discussion about whether to go to Rome or Paris only to have someone suggest Nagasaki as a compromise and have everyone agree in thirty seconds. That is the kind of thing that happens in cooperative storytelling games, and you need to have some sort of rubric to determine what kind of vampire and witch populations there are there.

The crutch of saying "there's a greater than average number of supernaturals here" only works in single author fiction, because only in single author fiction can the action be counted upon to stay in the enhanced areas. J K Rowling can have two thirds of the witches in England live within 3 blocks of Diagon Alley because she can choose to write two thirds of the action in England within three blocks of Diagon Alley. That kind of demographic distribution wouldn't fly in an RPG because in a cooperative story the protagonists might end up in Birmingham or Redding or Derby. If the setting's author's favorite locations are all well above the average in supernatural saturation, all those other places that RPGs end up must logically be more mundane.

Uneven geographic distribution works in Anita Blake because a lot of stuff happens in St. Louis, but if the players for whatever reason decided that they liked Kansas City or Omaha better, the statement that a disproportionate amount of vampires were in St. Louis would be essentially a giant fuck you to all of them.

If you're building your Vampire game, the smart thing is to define areas that have higher than 'normal' concentrations of vampires, and WHY. Old European capitals might all have high concentrations for easy to imagine reasons. Detroit or Columbus need a reason that they got that way in a relatively short period of time.

Absolutely not. That is the smart thing to do when you're going to write all the stories. If it's a vampire game the smart thing to do is to create a rubric that creates the expectation of a game-usable number of vampires in as many places as possible. The only thing you get by having Columbus, Ohio have a playable number of vampires and Cleveland, Ohio have an unplayable number of vampires (or vice versa) is to piss off players who want to play in Cleveland instead of Columbus (or vice versa). You gain literally nothing by trying to turn Planet Fucking Earth intoa points of light setting. There is no conservation of detail. You don't get to "save effort" by not writing up Toronto or Las Vegas, because it's a low fantasy setting and those places are already written for you.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Never mind oceans, there are astronomical units between the Diagon Alley bullshit and the general idea that the number of humans per monster isn't the same worldwide.

Defining a particular city as having either an average or an above-average number of vampires is basically value-neutral at worst, and having some of each makes thins more interesting. Defining specific real places as being canonically devoid of supernaturals despite having the population to support some supernaturals has its risks, but giving Arkham, Massachusetts as a "small town that has enough supernaturals" and Beatosu, Ohio and Argleton, Lancashire as examples of "here be no monsters" isn't going to piss any real people off and is going to give a template for if you decide a particular real location is actually somewhere to go homesteading in your local game.

[deaddmwalking]

How many lions are in Iowa?

I know for a fact that there is plenty of deer - enough to support a healthy population of wild lions. Outside of zoos, there are no African lions; in the whole state there are supposed to be 21 mountain lions. The population could be many times that, but they were hunted nearly to extinction.

If you define Columbus as an area with a high concentration of vampires, you're going to have a lot of reasons to go to Columbus. If you define Cleveland as an area with fewer than average vampires, you're probably suggesting that there's less reason to go there, but not necessarily. Both are cities of ~2 million in the metro area, and they're both in Ohio, so culturally they've got a lot in common. In your Vampire game, they're going to be virtually identical if they have the same number of supernaturals in roughly the same concentration.

If Columbus is 'full' but Cleveland is not, PCs will want to go to Cleveland to establish a new domain; it encourages using the landscape for different types of play.